Best Books of 2023

The greatest of traditions have a timeless quality that allows us to imagine ourselves inhabiting an unbroken chain of custom that goes back into the mists of the ancient past. And so it is with Monsters & Manuals 'Best Books of...' lists, which each year are keenly awaited by small, ruddy-cheeked children up and down the land, so that they can refer to it when deciding what to put on their Christmas lists to St Nick.

This year, the recommendations will be as follows. I limiting myself here to five books, as is the tradition; according to Goodreads - where I religiously review every book I read - I read thirty-three books in total this year, which I think is less than usual. I went back and forth over whether to include Beowulf, literally the last thing I 'read', but technically I didn't read it (I listened) and it was the subject of my most recent blog entry anyway (and will be the subject also of the next). 

So, in no particular order, the top five are:

1. Who Framed Colin Wallace? by Paul Foot. This, an account of the trial for murder of a British serviceman who blew the whistle on a 'dirty tricks' campaign by MI5 in Northern Ireland, has nothing whatsoever to do with the subject matter of this blog, but I thought the book was a great read and highly recommend it. From my Goodreads review:

I was swept up in this tale, which is written in an utterly absorbing way and which successfully builds a meticulously researched and argued case that Wallace was framed. The account of his trial in itself is absolutely superb - indeed, it's difficult to imagine a better example of a detailed dissection of court-room procedure in all of non-fiction. The book is marred slightly by the author's evident biases, which at times lead one to question whether he can have viewed the evidence dispassionately. But even if one does not agree with its conclusions, it's impossible to put down.

2. The Knight and The Wizard by Gene Wolfe (okay - I suppose I lied when I said this list would contain five books). I wrote a series of posts (beginning here) on the blog about The Wizard Knight after reading the series, and probably bored the pants off my readership through repeated references to it thereafter, but the fact of the matter is that great books sometimes have that effect - and these are genuinely Great Books. From my Goodreads reviews:

(The Knight) I read this almost 20 years ago and liked it, but second time around it has grown immeasurably in the telling, possibly because a middle-aged man can see within it themes which a younger man ignores or rejects. It is very much a tale about men and manhood, and I suspect quite alienating to female readers as a result, but there's nothing really wrong with that (I've got no problem with books being written by women for women) - and what it has to say about the subject is extremely important, counter-cultural and profound. 

(The Wizard) I am thoroughly prepared to accept that the first Act of this novel is too long and at times tortuous. This probably means I should give it less than 5 stars. But in a way the difficulty of that section is almost worth it for the emotional payoff of what comes after. Wolfe here achieves that rarest of things in contemporary fiction: a genuinely happy ending (who has the guts to try to write one of those these days?) that is thoroughly convincing and satisfying. In this respect, it reminded me a lot of TH White's The Ill-Made Knight, to which it makes an excellent companion piece.

3. Last Witnesses by Svetlana Alexievich. I am a huge fan of Alexievich's work but nothing could prepare me for the emotional body blow that comes from reading this book for the first time. Simply a retelling, in their own words, of the stories of people who had been children in the Soviet Union (chiefly Belarus) at the time of the Nazi invasion in 1941, it contains the full gamut of human experience across the spectrum - the depths of sorrow and despair, and the glory of hope and love, and all that lies between. An amazing, 'Best Books of a Lifetime" contender. From my Goodreads review:

The less said about some books the better, because they cannot be improved by another's words - only diminished. This is indeed the philosophy underlying all of Alexievich's work: that other people's stories must speak for themselves and could only be made worse by inserting the interviewer's perspective. This, in any case, is an unspeakably moving book - suffering on every page, but also survival and redemption. It made me understand the human condition better for having read it.

4. The Inheritors by William Golding. The short, terrible, horrifying, and disturbing tale of the meeting between a group of neanderthals and a group of homo sapiens, and of the passing away of one world and its replacement with the next. Somebody recommended in the comments to an entry on this blog that I should read this, and I'm very glad they did (it might even have been this guy); it changed my perspective on what fiction could be. From my Goodreads review:

A great novel will make you understand human nature better, and in a different way. This novel is very great, because it does this with stark purity by forcing us to confront humanity from the outside, as it would be perceived by minds that are not our own. This is an achievement that truly merits being labelled a work of genius. That it is also a work of great lyrical beauty and terrible tragedy makes that achievement more unlikely, and more impressive still.

5. Now We Are Six by A A Milne. Is this cheating? I suppose it might be cheating. But I deeply enjoyed the experience of reading the poems in this collection to my eldest child, over and over again, during the course of the year. To the adult ear there is something truly magical about the rhythms and cadences of Milne's; one rarely ever reads poetry nowadays, really, and when one does one tends to read pretentious and impenetrable stuff like Pablo Neruda or free verse like Raymond Carver. Milne set himself an altogether different task: picking a meter (sometimes quite a complex one), sticking strictly to it, and communicating clearly and effectively - and beautifully - while doing so. This is enough to inspire one to try it oneself. From my Goodreads review:

These poems must be read out loud (ideally to one's son or daughter) in order to appreciate the sonorous cadences of AA Milne's verse. Things have changed in the last 100 years; what was expected of the reader in terms of poetic literacy were much higher in 1927, and some of the rhyme structures and rhythms strike the modern ear as genuinely complex. This makes the book all the more useful in communicating to a child the beauty of the English language deployed well.

*

A funny year, in retrospect, in that I read almost no SF or fantasy (Gene Wolfe excepted, and unless you count The Inheritors), and read very few books that really had me properly hooked - I noted down quite a few two- and three-star reviews. But the ones that I loved, I really loved. 

Do feel free to leave your own lists in the comments - I can never have enough recommendations for good reading material.

The Clan of Cain: Ogres, Elves, Evil Phantoms and Giants

I recently had the opportunity on a long drive to listen to Seamus Heaney reading his own translation of Beowulf from start to finish. It was a real treat, and I highly recommend it. I had read Beowulf before in other translations, but long ago, and the words are of course meant to be spoken rather than read; it is a much more powerful experience that way, especially (and strangely) when delivered in Heaney's decidedly un-Germanic Irish brogue. 

I was very struck by the poem's syncretism (more on this in future posts) and the way in particular Germanic myth and Old Testament legend are able to fit alongside one another almost seamlessly. Hence:

Grendel was the name of this grim demon haunting the marches, marauding round the heath and the desolate fens; he had dwelt for a time in misery among the banished monsters, Cain's clan, whom the Creator had outlawed and condemned as outcasts. For the killing of Abel the Eternal Lord had exacted a price: Cain got no good from committing that murder because the Almighty made him anathema and out of the curse of his exile there sprang ogres and elves and evil phantoms and the giants too who strove with God time and again until He gave them their reward.

The idea that the creatures of Northern European myth were born from the murder of Abel by Cain is just too wonderful not to spur the imagination (as is the idea of giants literally fighting against God himself), and it would be incredible to me if no other RPG bloggers or writers have noticed it or done something with it. Nonetheless, it very much makes me want to do something with it - perhaps along the lines of the single class paladin campaign, with paladins conceptualised as warriors who specifically battle the 'clan of Cain' and protect humanity against them.

The interesting thing about the 'clan of Cain' - aside from the fact that it groups elves with the bad guys, which is always how I have thought elves work best - is the distinct division into four categories: ogres, elves, evil phantoms ('orcneas' in the original Old English, the only instance of the word appearing to our knowledge, and apparently thought by Old English scholars to be a compound of 'hell corpse') and giants. This is suggestive of four clear archetypes into which monstrous threats can be divided.

The easiest is the last: giants here are clearly meant to be genuinely huge giants capable of actually struggling with the almighty. (The Old English has 'gigantas', which speaks to me of something truly gigantic and also demigod-like, stemming as it does from an ultimately Greek source.) The vision I have is of titanic cthonic or celestial beings of immortal character and scale, rather than just a big person in the traditional D&D mode.

Another easy one is elves - understood as capricious and malevolent, or perhaps simply incapable of empathising with humanity. Not the elves of Tolkien but something more like the Aelf of The Wizard Knight who come in the night to steal babies or mislead travellers, and are of many different varieties. 

Then there are the 'evil phantoms', clearly simplest to understand as the undead, but perhaps also encompassing demonic and devilish spirits born from Hell or the Abyss (or, indeed, the dead brought back to life as demonic spirits). Here, I imagine everything from D&D-style zombies and skeletons all the way up to Lord Soth, and on the other hand the lemures, manes, pit fiends, succubi and so on that we tend to think of as 'demons' in the classical sense. It's all grouped under the orcneas category.

And finally we come to the most difficult category to define, the ogres. The original has 'eotonas', which obviously has a similar root to 'jotunn', but this conjures in the mind precisely the same kind of image as 'gigantas' - a demigodlike, supernatural figure of immense size and power. This is clearly the meaning of the word in the Eddas. Wikipedia provides us with the interesting information, however, that the word's root is the proto-Germanic word 'etunaz', which is connected with 'etanan' ('to eat'), and that from this were derived various Old Norse and Old English words connected with consumption, gluttony and greed. Could this make 'ogre' a catchall then for the type of creatures that we might traditionally think of as goblinish or orcish, and which make their living from catching and eating people? Or maybe even evil dwarves, acquisitive, avaricious and grasping - like perhaps the duergar or derro?

I like this basic idea of dividing threats into four categories, and one could even thereby subdivide paladins into four types, each specially equipped for taking on one of the monster types in particular: the giant-killer being especially difficult to kill and physically strong; the elf-killer being especially knowledgeable in/resistant to magic and charms; the phantom-killer being very good at smiting evil spirits; and the ogre-killer being very skilled in melee. This would allow some differentiation by archetype, even while maintaining the basic framework of the 'everything is paladins' motif. 

You could even call it The Clan of Cain. 

The Sunday Seven: November 26th, 2023

Each Sunday, I share seven links to items of interest that have crossed my eye across the preceding week. Here are this week's:

• Patrick Stuart's Gackling Moon kickstarter is live
• I did not see the new(ish) Dungeons and Dragons film, but it seems a sequel is in the works: D&D is genuinely having a cultural moment
• Settlers of a Dead God - an animal fantasy setting in which the PCs are anthropomorphic insects exploring the corpse of a gigantic dead god - intrigues me
• Rapier versus Katana. Yes, they did it. (Years ago.) These comparison videos are always stupid - you would have to run the experiment 10,000 times with 10,000 different sets of competitors to get anything like convincing results - but still fun.
• I find myself often linking to this blog, but Mythlands of Erce has some excellent stuff to say about the most underrated (least overrated?) edition of D&D
• You will have seen Grognardia's post about the 10 Commandments of D&D, but I think it is worth flagging regardless
• Napoleon is in the news a bit because of the new Ridley Scott film (which I will not watch); I very strongly recommend Andrew Roberts' Napoleon the Great, if you have not read it

Ground Up Campaign Setting Building, Or: These Goblins Ride...

We tend to think of campaign settings in terms of grand design: the creation of a world, starting with a high concept and working from top, down. 

This is not, though, always or even usually how human creativity works; we just as often begin with the tiny seed of an idea and then gradually nurture it to prolific growth. George RR Martin, for example, started with a very simple image - a family with five children discovering five direwolves - and extrapolated A Song of Ice and Fire from there. Tolkien began The Hobbit simply by jotting down the opening line - 'In the hole in the ground there lived a hobbit' - in a flash of inspiration, and the rest followed (and, of course, his 'Leaf by Niggle' is a beautiful allegory for this mode of creation). I'm sure one could cite many more examples. 

It occurred to me today that if one were seeking inspiration one could do worse than creating a method for generating such small ideas. One such method would be the These Goblins Ride.... Table. The idea here is to begin the creation of a campaign region simply by imagining what mounts a group of goblins would be riding in a wilderness encounter. Viz:

These Goblins Ride... Table

Roll 1d10:

1- Ostriches

2 - Giant snakes

3 - Giant newts

4 - Reindeer

5 - Elephants

6 - Llamas

7 - Giant seagulls

8 - Buffalo

9 - Giant tortoises

10 - Giant anteaters

The idea here is that the mere act of imagining a set of goblins riding ostriches, or giant seagulls, or reindeer, immediately results in a mental picture giving rise to a chain of further images. Goblins riding reindeer to my mind's eye implies rolling tundra, dotted with patches of not-yet-melted snow and exposed hunks of black moraine; it implies nomadic tribes of humans on whom the goblins prey, and perhaps a great tent city where these tribes congregate to trade, marry, and make merry; it implies desolate hillsides of sheer scree in which can be seen from a distance dark caves; it implies glaciers riddled with tunnels; it implies roaming bands of quaggoths, yetis, and frost giants - and white or silver dragons lying in slumber beneath unnamed ranges of craggy mountains. 

Goblins riding anteaters, on the other hand, suggests to me something like the pampas - fertile grassland pulsating with life under a warm blue sky. It implies abandoned giant ant hills like towers or fortresses dotting the landscape, harbouring ghosts and demons; it implies anacondas and crocodiles lurking in myriad waterways; it implies armadillo-skinned orcs and elves with domesticated pumas; it implies human societies thriving on symbiotic coordination with tame giant ants; it implies thunderstorms that bring with them swarms of elemental spirits or demons of the air. 

I could go on. Clearly, one could easily extend this table both to include more rows but also to produce something more complicated and broad, so that instead of goblins one could generate a wide range of initial races and a wide range of mounts. But you get the idea in principle: when in doubt, just think, 'These goblins ride....what?'

A Trap Has Been Placed Here to Kill Hornet-Women

I am currently finishing off my next big project - the Three Mile Tree megadungeon.

One of the entries in the key begins with the phrase contained in the title to this entry: 'A trap has been placed here to kill hornet-women.'

I know what the trap is. I want you to give me your ideas in the comments!

The Sunday Seven, 19th November 2023

Each Sunday, I share seven links to items of interest that have crossed my eye across the preceding week. Here are this week's:

• He has been coy about it, but Patrick Stuart's kickstarter for his next project, Gackling Moon, is in the works
• The BBC World Service did a radio play of William Gibson's Neuromancer in 2002; it is available on YouTube here and it is truly surreal
• My love for The Wizard Knight is known throughout the land; here is Gene Wolfe being interviewed about it
• You probably know about this (I am behind the curve these days, in my fortress of solitude) but Palladium is running a Kickstarter for a 'redux version' of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness 
• Simon Roper, an archaeologist, makes some fascinating videos about historical speech - here he is demonstrating what a South East English accent sounded like down the centuries
• Here is Ingmar Bergman talking about his demons; I find the insecurities of people like this, who by anyone's measure can be said to have achieved greatness in their field, immensely reassuring
• I don't know if you have come across this guy's extreme camping videos, but they are great inspiration for imagining what wilderness travel looks like and the kind of challenges PCs would experience crossing a hexmap 

Worst Five Monsters

What defines a 'bad' monster? For me, it generally has at least one of these three qualities. First, it shatters verisimilitude by being either 'jokey' or just really hard to visualise or imagine. Second, it has some nuclear-grade special ability that can only really be avoided or circumvented by a successful saving throw rather than player intelligence. Third, it is just boring, usually because it is too much like a lot of other monsters, or because it has no obvious role beyond being a benevolent quest-dispenser or GMPC.

These qualities we can call, for shorthand, silliness, unfairness, and boringness. 

On this basis, I would say that the Worst Five Monsters^TM in the 2nd edition Monstrous Manual are:

5. Banshee. I am not averse to the concept of this monster in principle, as the concept of a banshee as it exists in folklore is deeply eerie and evocative. And actually the Monstrous Manual entry is nicely written and provides some good ideas for use of a banshee in a campaign region. But the monster itself is high in boringness (its role overlaps too much with that of the ghost or spectre) and unfairness (it gets to just show up, scream, and then everybody might die). 

4. Cloaker. The picture in the Monstrous Manual does this monster no favours, but it is intrinsically very high in silliness, both through shattering verisimilitude (try picturing a flying cloak with glowing red eyes attacking somebody in your mind's eye and tell me it doesn't immediately transform into a scene from a cartoon) and for having no obvious justification for its existence other than surprising adventurers. And then you have the fact that for some reason it can emit magical 'moans' of different intensities. Now try imagining that: a moaning, flying cloak with a face in the middle.

3. Faerie Dragon. I just think that the last thing that any D&D campaign needs is a creature which 'thrives on pranks, mischief and practical jokes'. Practical jokes are visual, for one thing, and are not funny when being verbally described, but the more important issue is that joke monsters are like campaign cul-de-sacs.  A random encounter with something which simply intends to 'wreak mischief on passers-by' provides no adventure hooks, nor danger, but simply acts as a distraction or speed-bump. The faerie dragon is therefore both silly AND boring.

2. Ki-rin. There are too many of this kind of monster in the Monstrous Manual, and they all bleed into one: couatls, lammasu, shedu, sphinxes...all of the same: flying benevolent sky dwellers who descend to the the world below to smite evil and help out the PCs (presumably on the basis of their taking part in some pre-ordained quest or mission). I am fully on board with the idea that there should be powerful good entities in the world if there are to be powerful evil ones, and that enterprising players should on discovery of their existence seek them out for aid, but there is too much of a duplication of roles her and too much of a stink of 'plot' about the ki-rin in particular. The boringness is off the charts. 

1. Sea Lion. Just stop it. 

On Sympathy for the Young

In my last post, I linked to a Wired article which purports to be about a Ghibli-inspired D&D 5th edition setting, but which is really about the bigger issue of 'wholesomeness' and the need which young people nowadays seem to feel for media that is, for want of a better word, 'nicer' than what they are used to.

There was a time when I would have dismissed this is the whining of softies, and accused youngsters of wanting to be special snowflakes. But in recent years I have increasingly come around to the position that life simply is psychologically harder for young people nowadays than for previous generations (those born after, say, the 1950s), for all that it is materially more secure. I therefore have a lot of sympathy for the idea that we could probably do with a more wholesome media landscape in general than the one to which we have become accustomed. 

What, though, do I mean by life being psychologically harder? Really, there are three linked phenomena at work.

The first is I think obvious: smartphones. I am glad that there appears to be a head of steam now building towards more robust regulation of these devices, and that there is increasingly more recognition of what should have been evident all along - namely that the effect of smartphone use on the developing brain is nothing short of disastrous. But I still think we are at the very foothills of our understanding of the deleterious consequences of widespread smartphone use. My day job brings me into contact with hundreds of young people every year, and I increasingly see what I have witnessed over the past decade as something like a slow-motion apocalypse. People who are eighteen years old in 2023 are almost a different species to people who were eighteen years old in 2012, and they bear the countenance of people who have been mentally scarred by the mere process of growing up. It's not their fault: they have been subjected to what can only really be thought of as relentless psychological assault, driven by a technology which is designed to be addictive in a way that puts crack cocaine to shame (all the while going through what everyone knows to already be the toughest period of life - the teenage years). It is desperately sad, and I think in ten or twenty years' time parents will have a lot of apologising to do to their children for allowing all of this sorrow to be caused under their watch. (I direct your attention in particular to this recent article for a very interesting and lucid analysis of a central aspect of the phenomenon, which is the problem of loneliness and involuntary celibacy.)

The second is also evident to most thoughtful people, and it is the fact that the world has simply become a lot less social, and a lot 'colder', over the past thirty or so years. Technology has obviously facilitated this. But whatever the cause, the texture of life has fundamentally and drastically altered. One should not look back on the past with those famous rose-tinted glasses, but there were many ways in which life was simply more communal, more supportive, and more forgiving than it is now. I grew up in humble circumstances in one of the poorest regions of the UK, but there were lots of compensatory factors that made life cheerful - kids playing in the street, neighbours looking out for each other and lending each other money where needed, community groups and clubs, religious meetings, pubs and newsagents on almost every street corner, big family gatherings. The importance of this dense web of sociality has radically diminished in my lifetime, and for young people in particular things have become as a consequence just a little bit, well, shit. They have fewer opportunities to develop, fewer opportunities to make friends, fewer opportunities to meet romantic partners in a natural way, and fewer opportunities to mix with people from different generations. All of this adds up to a feeling of being largely alone against a cold and unfriendly world (with only fake online sociality to compensate).

The third is more diffuse, but I think perhaps the most important of all, and it is the spiritual consequence of feeling as thought there is not a great deal of purpose to being alive. Most young people nowadays leads lives of comfort that previous generations could not have imagined. And vast swathes of them are able to postpone the transition to adulthood almost indefinitely with university, postgraduate study, extended periods of living at home. This is in one sense an astonishing privilege, but it is also a curse. Part of what makes life feel as though it is worth living is the sense that what one does matters. One gets this sense, very keenly, when one has to lead an independent life as a productive contributor to society - paying the bills, raising a family, doing a good job at work. One does not get it from studying something vaguely interesting for year after year (unless one is very academically gifted) or from living at home with Mum and Dad and temping. In short, young people now grow up in an atmosphere almost of enforced listlessness. And this saps the soul in a way that people of my generation (who were generally expected to stand on their own two feet from the age of eighteen) cannot quite imagine.

I do not wish to misinterpreted: life was materially very hard for my family when I was a kid, and is still materially very hard for very many people even in purportedly wealthy societies like Britain's. Life is materially much harder still in the developing world. And life was also undoubtedly psychologically harder in many ways for certain categories of people in previous generations - soldiers who had fought in war, gay people who were relentlessly bullied, and so on. But I'm not sure that previous generations ever had to deal with this strange malaise that has set itself like a pall over the lives of our current youth, and which seems almost purposively designed to direct their energies only to the most soul-crushing aspects of life: consumerism, light entertainment, pornography, the self. 

What is to be done about this is beyond my pay grade. But facilitating people getting together with their mates and enjoying a wholesome pastime together to my eye seems like one of the most important contributions that anybody can make by way of a remedy or palliative. It at least might be a bit of an antidote to the unrelenting sordidness that the internet has become. And in that sense, I wish Obojima the very best of luck.

The Sunday Seven, 12th November 2023

Each Sunday, I share seven links to items of interest that have crossed my eye across the preceding week. Here are this week's:

• On Mythlands of Erce, we hear about 'Why "Roll under" Ability checks really are the best of checks', and we agree
• Dungeon stocking is one of the most important and enjoyable of DMing activities, and I am always curious to learn how other people do it; In Places Deep posted one of the better examples I've read
• I will probably write a post about this subject myself, since I used to be a translator, but World Building & Woolgathering has a great little piece on translation errors/issues in maps
• I can't remember if I have posted about this before, but the UK's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has an online map application which allows you to zoom in on the UK to beautifully crisp and granular OS-level detail - it is extremely useful in, for example, coming up with maps on the fly for random wilderness encounters; stealing names; or even just drawing inspiration from to create more realistic-looking maps
• There is a new thing called Obojima - a setting for 5th edition 'that aims to bring the aesthetics of Studio Ghibli' to D&D
• In case there is the slightest chance you are living under a rock, Mythic Bastionland has now launched and is likely relevant to your interests
• This may be old news; I have no idea, as I am out of the loop, but His Majesty the Worm sounds great and intrigues me in that 'summer of 08' way

The Obliqueness of Real World Place Names

RPG setting designers tend to adopt one of three approaches to place names. The first is just to come up with made-up assortments of syllables arranged to make a pleasing and evocative sound: Allansia; Al Qadim; New Crobuzon.

The second, I think generally more effective, approach is to use place names that actually mean something: The Misty Mountains, Cloud City, King's Landing. 

The third, I think least effective, one is to deploy names that break the fourth wall by imagining the inhabitants of a place to have deliberately given it a 'cool' name: Bloodhand Gap, Moon's Spawn, Fang.

When you think about real world place names, though, what is most noticeable about them (certainly in Britain) is their strange obliqueness. It is not as though they are a bundle of made-up sounds; but nor very often do they quite make sense when imagined as standalone English phrases. They are like something Tolkien would have made up, but squinted at through a pane of translucent glass, so that they become misshapen and strange. Here, for example, are some names of places from the countryside not far from where I live:

Howly Winter

The Dimples

Kitten Tom

Benty Band

Softley

Candlesleve Sikes

Cockshot Wood

Featherstone Rowfoot

Pyke Dyke

Far Town

Wool House

Sillywrea

Spout Bog

Plunder Heath

Humble Dodd

Pudgment Hill

Piper's Drone

Tudhump Holm

Drowning Holes

Pedler's Grave

Limestone Gears

Howlerhirst Crags

Deer Play

Knogley

Yes, you can imagine why 'Wool House' would end up being a place name, and perhaps also 'Pyke Dyke' and 'Drowning Holes' (something dark is hinted at there). But most of the rest of the list inhabits a kind of limbo - almost making sense but not quite.

This is I think partly likely a result of an Anglicization of pre-existing Celtic names; hearing the locals refer to such-and-such a place with a Celtic word, the Anglo-Saxons would have heard something which to their ear sounded different, and over time would have developed a pronunciation which sounded familar to them. Hence we get the almost-English quality of 'Kitten Tom' or 'Sillywrea'.

But it is also simply the case that the real world has an impossibly rich history, and place names are produced by a continual layering of events, dialectal changes, population shifts and deliberate choices, one of top of the other, over the ages. A human author or game designer doesn't have a hope in hell of emulating this - there is not a DM in the world who would think to call a village 'Howly Winter' - and as a result there is generally something deeply dissatisfying about the names we tend to come up with. The best way to get around this is obviously just to grab a map (DEFRA's magic map is a good place to start) and start plundering.